MEDAMAHANUWARA, Sri Lanka — Past the end of a
remote mountain road, down a rutted dirt track, in a concrete house
that lacked running water but bristled with smartphones, 13 members
of an extended family were glued to Facebook. And they were furious.

A family member, a truck driver, had died after a
beating the month before. It was a traffic dispute that had turned
violent, the authorities said. But on Facebook, rumors swirled that
his assailants were part of a Muslim plot to wipe out the
country’s Buddhist majority.

… For
months, we had been tracking riots and lynchings around the world
linked to misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, which pushes
whatever content keeps users on the site longest — a potentially
damaging practice in countries with weak institutions and histories
of social instability.

Time and again, communal hatreds overrun the
newsfeed unchecked as local media are displaced by Facebook and
governments find themselves with little leverage over the company.
Some users, energized by hate speech and misinformation, plot
real-world attacks.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security
has processed travelers with facial recognition scans at many U.S.
airports, part of pilot programs during the past year that the
government now believes it’s ready to roll out nationwide.

So okay…. do we know the accuracy rate? Do we
know the false positive rate for minorities of specific
subpopulations? Is there a reasonable system for challenging and
quickly correcting errors? Is this really ready for primetime or
wider usage?

The topic must be hot, this collection sells for
$120. However some are available online for free. (I think the
Privacy Foundation needs to increase its Seminar prices!)

Professor Daniel Solove calls our attention to
this new collection of essays on consumer privacy.

Evan Seligner, Jules Polonetsky, and Omer
Tene have just published a terrific edited volume of essays called
The
Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Privacy. This is a truly
impressive collection of writings by a wide array of authors from
academia and practice. There’s a robust diversity of viewpoints on
wide-ranging and cutting-edge issues. The book has a hefty price
tag, but it is a terrific resource.

Read
Dan’s full post, as he provides a table of contents and links
to copies of the essays where they are already available for free
online.

I think we could create an App to determine when a
warrant is required and then to help generate one. Assuming there is
some logic behind the process.

If police want to snoop through a
vehicle’s black box data — even after an accident — they will
have to get a warrant. That was the conclusion Tuesday of the
Missouri Court of Appeals, which took up the case of a black box
seized from a truck involved in a major collision on July 1, 2015.

"The
driver possesses an actual, subjective expectation of privacy in data
recorded by an ECM regarding that driver's operation of the vehicle,"
Judge Cynthia L. Martin wrote for the court. "We can affirm the
trial court's order granting the motion to suppress based on
longstanding Fourth Amendment jurisprudence involving trespass as a
basis to assert a Fourth Amendment violation as recently discussed in
the United States Supreme Court's decision in Jones."

The
judges noted that it did not matter that West had no idea there was a
box recording his every move installed in the truck because the
police officer made a physical intrusion into the vehicle to conduct
his electronic search. There were no exigent circumstances to do so
because there was no reason to think the truck contained anything
illegal.

When Democrats and Republicans in
Congress agree on something, it usually involves symbolic acts of
patriotism or minimally decent acts of disaster relief. Add to that
list: giving Mark Zuckerberg the third degree—and insisting that
his company face some
kind of consequence for the
Cambridge Analytica scandal and how cavalierly it has often
treated its users’ data. “I think it is time to ask whether
Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things,” Rep.
Greg Walden, a Republican from Oregon, said last Wednesday as he
opened up a House committee hearing with Zuckerberg. “I don’t
want to vote to have to regulate Facebook, but by God I will,” said
Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, during a Senate joint
committee hearing the day before the House’s. Democrats sounded
even more gung-ho about cracking down on the company. “This
incident demonstrates yet again that our laws are not working,”
said Rep. Frank Pallone, a Democrat from New Jersey. Congresswoman
Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois, laid it out plainly while
dressing down the 33-year-old CEO: “This is proof to me that
self-regulation simply does not work.”

Read more on Slate.
April asks why the
pre-eminent privacy advocacy organizations have not proposed anything
or even pressured Congress to take action. It’s an
interesting question.

EPIC has filed a Freedom of Information
Act lawsuit
to obtain the release of the unredacted Facebook Assessments from the
FTC. The FTC
Consent Order required Facebook to provide to the FTC biennial
assessments conducted by an independent auditor. In March, EPIC
filed a Freedom of Information Act request
for the 2013, 2015, 2017 Facebook Assessments and related records.
EPIC’s FOIA request drew attention to a version of the 2017 report
available
at the FTC website. But that version is heavily redacted. EPIC is
suing now for the release of unredacted report. EPIC has an
extensive open
government practice and has previously obtained records from many
federal agencies. The case is EPIC v. FTC, No. 18-942 (D.D.C.
filed April 20, 2018).

An
auditing firm responsible for monitoring Facebook for federal
regulators told them last year that the company had sufficient
privacy protections in place, even after the social media giant lost
control of a huge trove of user data that was improperly obtained by
the political consulting firm Cambridge
Analytica.

The
assertion, by PwC, came in a report submitted to the Federal Trade
Commission in early 2017. The report, a
redacted copy of which is available on the commission’s
website, is one of several periodic reviews of Facebook’s
compliance with a 2011 federal consent decree, which required
Facebook to take wide-ranging steps to prevent the abuse of users’
information and to inform them how it was being shared with other
companies.

You might have noticed a
problem when you try to use your smartphone to navigate a big city:
your GPS location is usually super inaccurate. Sometimes it's only
by a few feet, but if you’re in a particularly dense part of the
city where satellite signals are blocked by high-rise buildings, the
discrepancy can be orders of magnitude greater. For most people,
it’s just one of the many modern-day nuisances of urban life. But
for companies that rely on two people with smartphones finding each
other in a labyrinth of steel and concrete — like Uber — GPS
inaccuracy is a source of never-ending pain and frustration.

… The Global Positioning
System project was launched in the early 1970s as a way to overcome
the limitations of previous navigation systems. It was originally
designed for things that fly, like planes. So one of the core
assumptions was that all satellites would have a direct line of
sight, meaning the signal would always travel in a straight line.
But now, those assumptions have changed, thanks to the ubiquity
of smartphones and the rise of location-based services like Uber.

… To fix the problem, Iland and Irish used a
process called occlusion modeling, by which Uber’s algorithm looks
at a full 3D rendering of the city and does a probabilistic estimate
of where you are based, which satellites you can see, and which you
can’t.

As so often happens, I don’t get it. I can
understand wanting to give everyone Internet access. Why do we need
a “live” video of every place on earth?

Bill Gates,
Airbus and SoftBank invest in satellite video startup that wants to
help us ‘see and understand the Earth live and unfiltered’

Bellevue, Wash.-based EarthNow aims to operate a
fleet of small satellites that will send continuous real-time video
views of our planet from Earth orbit.

… Wyler made clear that EarthNow would
leverage the design work that’s already been done for OneWeb.

“We created the world’s first low-cost,
high-performance satellites for mass production to bridge the digital
divide,” he said in today’s news release. “These very same
satellite features will enable EarthNow to help humanity understand
and manage its impact on Earth.”

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.